The Fourth Angel Read online

  ‘Could you remember?’ Cob laughs.

  ‘Man, diggit, I kept telling the shit I never done any,’ Manny goes on. ‘And like he keeps insisting how many times, so I say, “Would you believe once?” and he says, “You confessed!” and diggit, man, I say, “Hell, no, man, I didn't say I did dope—I just asked would you believe once?” Man, it freaked him out!’

  ‘Where did they interrogate you?’ Shell asks, an idea forming.

  ‘In a fucking small room. Dark except for one light. On me,’ Manny says bitterly. He turns to Jerry, to explain something very important: ‘At first I used to cry…’

  ‘But no more,’ Shell says emphatically.

  ‘No more,’ Manny repeats equally emphatically.

  The summer sun is lingering on the horizon reluctant to surrender. But shadows are converging like warring giants under the tangle of trees. The fact that it's Friday augments the sense of desolation. The afternoon, the week will end—and nothing has happened. The voyeur escaped. A space of time passed, they did not move with it.

  Cob says abruptly: ‘There goes another creep into the head!’

  Before the restroom, a man stands desolately, idly.

  ‘We'll interrogate him!’ Shell announces. Swiftly a desperate game forms: ‘One of you cats go down to the head; whoever tries to come on with you, you bring him up here…’

  Cob is caught quickly in the proposed plan: ‘Jerry can go he says, testing him.

  ‘No,’ Jerry protests.

  ‘You wanna be the fucking fourth angel or not?’ Cob asks.

  Jerry doesn't answer. He will not commit himself to their game. Not yet. Perhaps not at all.

  ‘You go, Cob,’ Shell says coldly.

  An assault, readied? Cob braces; ‘Why don't you, Shell? We'll trap …’ he spews the word like bitter poison ‘… a dike.’

  Cold, mutual smiles indicate a draw.

  ‘The dude down there split, man,’ Manny announces. ‘He looked up the hill and saw us and freaked and fucking split.’

  ‘There's too many of us, it's too open,’ Shell agrees. ‘We'll do it tonight,’ she ends the afternoon's search.

  Cob reacts like a jealous general not included in an important decision. ‘Maybe I don't want to split yet,’ he says.

  ‘Okay,’ Shell shrugs. She begins to walk away.

  Glancing back uncertainly at Cob, Manny follows her. For seconds, Jerry remains with Cob. But they look away from each other. Now Jerry walks after Shell. Manny is running down the hill, hooting like a television Indian.

  Coming down the hill deliberately slowly, sauntering, Cob finally joins them before Shell's parked car—new, shiny, expensive.

  ‘I told you her old man loves her,’ Manny tells Jerry, who's looking at the car.

  Shell frowns. Then: ‘I just blackmail him, that's all.’ She laughs. She opens the car door quickly.

  They get into the car. Cob in front with her, Manny and Jerry in the back, Shell drives out of the park with the expert skill of a racer. ‘Where do you live?’ she asks Jerry.

  ‘I'm staying at my sister's,’ Jerry says quickly. ‘She lives alone, she's divorced.’ Then: ‘But I've got to stop at … my house first.’ Where he lived with his mother. His mind sees her closed, vacant room, locked since her death.

  ‘What for?’ Cob seizes.

  ‘To feed our cats,’ Jerry says dully. Three cats. His and his mother's. He had tried taking them with him to his sister's, but the cats' panic had infected him. He returned them to the empty house; he goes there twice a day to feed them. And to be with memories of her. ‘We'll be selling the house soon …’ Another end, another loss, another death. Quickly, he gives Shell directions.

  They're there: before an old stately, two-storey house with white columns. Already it has the look of a house sorrowfully abandoned. The grass, uncut, has been invaded by flowery weeds.

  ‘I dig old pads,’ Cob says, ‘let's see the inside.’ He's opening the car door.

  ‘No!’ Jerry's abrupt protest surprises him. ‘It'll just take a minute to feed the cats.’ He realized: he doesn't want them in that house. Why? He's already out of the car.

  Inside the graceful old house: enormous rooms, chandeliers, carpets—bespeaking a wealth which faded many years ago with his father's death—an incident that is the barest ghost of a memory from his early childhood.

  Instantly the cavernous sighing loneliness of the house suffuses him.

  Two long-haired cats approach him soundlessly. But the third, his mother's favorite, a mysterious cat, a beautiful, sleek Burmese female with hair like brown velvet, moves away from him. Feeling the emptiness. Not understanding, does she blame him? He strokes the two furry ones, hoping the third will join them.

  But she remains away, as she has from him and the other cats since death overwhelmed their world; remains staring at him with yellow eyes. Then she moves up the stairs. Jerry follows her slowly. The cat waits before the locked door. Quickly Jerry turns away from his mother's room: vacant, empty. Empty.

  Outside in Shell's car: ‘He didn't fucking want us in his house!’ Cob says indignantly.

  ‘I know,’ Shell says.

  Jerry is back. ‘Okay,’ he says. The yellow eyes of the brown Burmese feline haunt him.

  Shell is driving in a direction opposite to the one Jerry gave her as his sister's. Matching their cool, he doesn't question where they're going. There's the suddenly welcome promise of discovery, of crammed experience.

  Speeding along a wide street, past rushing desert hills.

  Resenting that Shell has not told him where they're going—and he suspects she has no definite plan—rashly Cob grabs for control of the shapeless situation: ‘We're going to an old house near the freeway.’

  ‘No, man,’ Shell says firmly, like a slap at him. ‘Not there.’

  Anger, bewilderment. Cob doesn't glance at her. She had understood, and she had challenged him.

  ‘But later we'll go there,’ Shell says after moments of victorious silence.

  As if his mind had chosen to open compulsively, incongruously, at this moment, Manny blurts crazily: ‘We all love each other!’

  Shell parks abruptly. Before them looms a large Catholic church. Its crosses are thrust angrily like spears at heaven.

  Jerry looks bitterly at the church. Whatever death is, that church represents the black mystery which seized his mother. And he hates it.

  They get out of the car.

  ‘We're going in there?’ Manny says, aghast. Automatically he begins to make the sign of the cross, stops, embarrassed. Instead, he puts on his shirt.

  ‘Where else would you fucking become a fourth angel?’ Cob seizes leadership from Shell and warns Jerry ambiguously.

  On the steps leading into the church, Shell coolly removes a small cellophane packet from the inside of her blouse.

  ‘You gonna light that shit here?’ Manny asks admiringly.

  ‘Why the hell not?’ Cob obviates the rashness of Shell's gesture. ‘Stoned is the only way to do a church.’

  Feeling tested, Jerry remains quiet. A spark of apprehension melds into excitement and anticipation.

  Shell rolls a joint of grass, she moistens the paper with her tongue. Openly, as if it were an ordinary cigarette, she lights it. She inhales deeply, passes it to Cob; he inhales even more deeply. Then it's Manny's turn. Now Jerry's. They watch him carefully—they know it's his first time. A double challenge, to do the dope and to do it openly, before the church.

  Imitating them, Jerry inhales deeply, deeply, holds the smoke. He waits eagerly for a magical reaction to the vaunted weed.

  The joint nothing but a roach now, Shell improvises a holder by splitting a match into two slivers, creating a pincer. When they can no longer hold the roach even with the pincer, on the edge of a match Shell fires what remains of the weed, blows it out, and holds it for Cob, then Manny, then Jerry to sniff the smoke.

  ‘I don't feel anything,’ Jerry says impatiently. What he does feel—stark
ly—is the presence of the church. The sun shatters on a mosaicked window depicting a great-winged angel slaying a dragon. The stained glass bleeds luminous colors.

  They light another number, passing it around like tribal Indians. Cars along the street drive by obliviously.

  Shell's look questions Jerry.

  ‘Nothing,’ he says flatly, the one word an accusation of the weed and them. He desperately wants the euphoria, even momentary, that is making Manny giggle uncontrollably.

  ‘You're probably on downers,’ Cob judges Jerry back.

  Jerry doesn't answer. But is that the reason? The tranquillizers—sleeping pills, and they had been his mother's—he's taken daily since her death?

  ‘We'll get you stoned,’ Shell says.

  ‘Right,’ Cob agrees coldly.

  ‘What if the priest sees us turning on here?’ Manny questions suddenly.

  ‘We'll turn him on,’ Cob tosses.

  Shell pulls open the heavy wooden door into the church. Inside, gaudily painted statues of saints ignore them, stare instead as if at a stone heaven. Candles in wine-colored glasses glisten like electric teardrops. At the feet of the crucified Jesus over the awesome altar, the sun melts the windows' colors like dyed wax blood on the floor.

  Except for themselves—and the statues like stark dead presences—the church is empty.

  Concealing his movements from the others, Manny half-kneels. Surreptitiously, he dips his fingers into the bowl of holy water—but does not touch his forehead with it.

  Jerry stares ferociously at the altar. He feels sorrow for the crucified figures, yes—and defiance toward the savage God that murdered his mother.

  Cob looks with curiosity about the church. ‘Far, far out,’ he approves.

  Shell opens the door of the confessional booth. With mock solemnity, she sits inside it.

  ‘For Chrissakes, Shell, what the hell are you into?’ Manny is openly horrified now. ‘It's the house of God,’ he blurts memorized words.

  ‘The house of God, huh?’ Cob says. ‘Then He must dig tripping—He sure digs far-out colors.’

  ‘I'm going to play priest,’ Shell whispers back at Manny. ‘And you're all going to confess.’

  Manny giggles nervously. Seriously: ‘You can't hear confessions, man, you're not like ordained.’

  Cob joins Shell's game: ‘You don't dig, Manny, it's not the priest you confess to, it's the booth; like the booth is wired to God.’

  ‘Shit, man,’ Manny laughs. Then fearfully he looks at the altar.

  Jerry has not moved. He wants God to see him, to know of his defiance. He wants to yell it out.

  In a parody of confessor, stunningly beautiful, a splash of color in the gray darkness of the confessional booth, Shell crosses her hands on her lap. ‘Who the hell is going to be first?’ she whispers.

  Manny is laughing hysterically now.

  ‘You, Manny!’ Cob asserts himself.

  ‘Man, I tole you,’ Manny says. ‘I already like confessed to the old shit at the J.D. home, man, like I tole you.’

  ‘This time it's different.’ Shell's strange game shapes. ‘This time you can confess for other people—how they've shit on you. Like confess for the old dude that fucked you over in the home.’

  ‘Far out!’ Doubled over with glee, Manny enters one side of the confessional booth. He half-kneels. Through the small screened window he faces Shell.

  ‘Confess their sins,’ Shell tries to imitate the voice of a gruff priest.

  Between nervous giggles, Manny whispers in mock confession: ‘Father … I mean, Sister-Priest, I'm the old shit from the J.D. home. Like I run it, dig, and I want to confess that I dig beating up on all the bad-ass kids.’

  Joining them suddenly—a manifestation of his defiant rebellion—Jerry explains to Shell: ‘Now you're supposed to ask How Many Times. They always ask How Many Times. Like that's how they give penance.’

  ‘I'd dig giving penance,’ Cob says softly.

  Shell intones: ‘How many fucking times?’

  Manny says: ‘As many times as it takes to give them an ass they can't sit on.’ He bursts into loud laughter. He continues: ‘Dig, Priest-Lady? There's this one bad-ass dude, man. His name is Manny and his mother calls the pigs to have him busted as incorrigible and runaway…’

  ‘Confess for her—for your old lady!’ Cob exhorts excitedly. He leans against the booth, listening intently.

  ‘Yes!’ Shell's approval comes like the lashing of an angry whip.

  Now Manny speaks in the falsetto of a woman: ‘Dear Lady-Priest, I want to confess to how I have fucked over my bad-ass son.’

  Quickly Jerry moves away from this part of the game. He turns to the sun-illumined window, to the savage angel and the flailing dragon of evil bleeding at his feet.

  ‘And diggit, Priest-Lady,’ Manny is going on, ‘I don't have no husband, but I have …’ The laughter wanes. ‘See, when I call the pigs to take my Manny away, like they just come in and …’ the voice becomes his own … ‘and they put the fucking handcuffs on me and take me and I'm fingerprinted, man, and they take my fucking clothes away, and then that shit tries to get a confession outa my head, instead of hers, my old lady's—and all she says to me when she goes to see me there is she's sorry, she's sorry.’ Manny tries to force laughter.

  ‘How many times?’ Shell says.

  ‘Shit, man, she sent me to that J.D. home at least a half-dozen times. Every time she … every time …’ He stops abruptly.

  ‘Every time she what? You've got to say!’ Shell demands.

  ‘Otherwise you can't give penance,’ Cob says.

  Manny lowers his head. ‘Every time she's fucking got a new boyfriend.’

  A glance of a frown touches Cob's face.

  ‘How many times?’ Shell continues relentlessly.

  ‘Over and over!’ Manny gasps.

  ‘How many goddam times, Manny?’ Shell demands fiercely now. ‘How many boyfriends!’

  ‘I fucking stopped counting!’ Manny almost-yells.

  ‘Estimate!’ Shell commands.

  ‘As many times as she's sent me away. More!’ Manny says. ‘But this last time, she had a change of fucking heart…’

  ‘A change of what?’ comes Shell's cold voice.

  ‘Heart! Heart!’ Manny flings the word.

  ‘That's what pumps the blood in the body,’ Cob says.

  ‘And it only changes when you die,’ Shell finishes.

  ‘See,’ Manny's words are tortured now, ‘she wants me to call her new boyfriends father! And I said fuck you, and she calls the pigs, and this time the old shit sends me to Gatesville, the prison for boys; they shackled our ankles with chains, we didn't even know where they were taking us, we didn't have no fucking trial—nothing! … Then I ran away from there!’

  ‘Ran away? Where?’ Cob is puzzled.

  Manny laughs bitterly. Then he whispers, almost inaudibly, in a small voice, ‘Home. Back to her…’

  Shell's lips fire words at him: ‘Don't fucking cry, Manny!’

  ‘Who's fucking crying!’ Manny protests. ‘I don't ever fucking cry!’

  Suddenly Jerry accosts Shell: ‘Stop it!’

  ‘Why?’ Cob demands.

  ‘Because he's upset—really upset,’ Jerry says.

  Shell's voice emerges frozen from the booth: ‘You don't dig, Jerry. Like we're helping him—we're helping him to stop feeling, so he'll never even want to cry.’

  To stop feeling … Jerry thinks.

  ‘Besides, Manny's just faking being all uptight,’ Cob says.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Manny says anxiously, ‘like I'm not uptight at all.’

  ‘Now penance,’ Cob reminds eagerly.

  ‘Yeah, I got to lay some heavy penance on them,’ Manny says, his voice controlled.

  ‘Give them hell,’ Shell says. She's still looking at Jerry.

  ‘What does the old shit who runs the J.D. home get, man?’ Cob coaxes.

  ‘He gets … The penance is … The sentenc
e will be …’ Manny begins. ‘He'll have to … He'll fucking have to …’ He closes his eyes, concentrating, his hands pressed against his forehead as if to squeeze out an enormous judgment. ‘She'll have to … My mother will have to …!’ But he can't finish. Quickly he leaves the booth.

  A long, long silence. The golden angel, the slain dragon, the eyeless statues—and the crucified figure—command the hollow church.

  ‘Now you, Cob,’ Shell says.

  ‘That's your trip,’ Cob answers quickly.

  ‘Wouldn't you like to pass penance on your old man for leaving you?’ Shell pursues relentlessly. ‘Or on your old lady?’

  Cob blanches, but his lips smile.

  ‘Or on your sister,’ Shell pronounces.

  ‘She's not …’ Cob begins. ‘And you, Shell?’ he thrusts back swiftly.

  ‘On my …’ She stops, too. ‘But it's Jerry's initiation, he's the fourth angel.’

  The sun has fled the mosaicked window. Both the dragon and the saint seem vanquished.

  ‘Let's split,’ Manny says, as if coming out of a daze.

  ‘Not until the fourth angel tells us who he'd sentence,’ Shell says from the booth.

  ‘Who, man?’ Cob insists.

  Jerry looks at the altar. Then he says, ‘I'd sentence God.’

  3

  ‘Now what?’

  Manny asked that question as if expecting a verdict. A hollow of time exists as they stand outside the church, the stained-glass window muted in the late Texas afternoon. Clouds like gauze are pasted on the orange horizon.

  ‘We could go to Jerry's pad,’ Cob insists.

  Jerry doesn't answer. He knows: He doesn't want them to invade memories of his mother in that house. He feels a marked tension between him and Cob. Over his persistence that they go to his house? Or also over Shell? Has she made it with him?—with Manny? the thought flashes, important.

  ‘No—we'll go to the old house by the freeway,’ Shell releases Jerry quickly.

  ‘You have a house to yourselves?’ Jerry asks.

  ‘Yeah—angel headquarters,’ Manny says. ‘Cob discovered it.’

  ‘A boarded-up house,’ Shell tells him. ‘They're going to knock it down. Until they do, it's ours.’

  An erratic breeze captures a frantic sheet of paper. Abandoned, the paper glides, then falls lightly on the street like a dead bird.